by David Caris
I’ve sent this out to my mailing list already, but if you’re not on that list and you want to read a few bonus chapters that fall between Book 1 and Book 2, here are three to get you going. Bishop’s tracking down information on the missing botulinum toxin in Lahore, Pakistan.
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Prologue
Cuenca, Spain
The bullet left John Kovac’s rifle at 2550 feet per second.
And found its target.
He saw Rose’s head snap back, a pair of white earbuds flaying outward.
Painless, he decided.
He had risked a headshot for this exact reason.
He lifted the pad of his finger off the trigger and, still using the scope, followed the green Júcar River back towards Cuenca.
No witnesses, either.
He started packing up. Bipod, suppressor, beanbag, DOPE book, and finally his rifle, which he returned to its scabbard.
Sliding forward out of his perch, Kovac stood and took one last look at the corpse. It appeared tiny without the scope, splayed on the hiking trail, a brutal and terrifying mess.
He felt no remorse.
For Bratislava, he reminded himself, before collecting up his pack and rifle.
He would spend the next week hiking deep into a national park, Serranía de Cuenca, where he would bury the rifle and all its accessories. He had positioned supplies at two separate locations, and when he did reemerge, it would be into a new town, with entirely different hiking gear and the beginnings of a beard.
In short, it was time to disappear.
Eight Years Later
Chapter 1
John Kovac had seen the boy twice already. Once while going for a jog, and then again while walking to the gym. This was the kid’s third strike.
It was 4:10 a.m.. Depending on a person’s perspective, that was either a very early morning or a very late night. For Kovac, it was a very early morning. He was out jogging again, this time along the Themes. The boy was on the path just up ahead, but he didn’t belong here and certainly not at this hour. He was wearing gang clothes, like he’d stepped straight out of the Hackney estates. For this boy, 4:10 a.m. was a very late night.
Kovac dropped to a walk as he passed, but kept an unswerving line. He pulled his baseball cap down, put his hands in his windbreaker pockets and looked straight ahead. Everything Kovac saw, he saw in his peripheral vision. The kid was olive-skinned, perhaps twelve, and carrying a concealed knife in his boxers. He was also wearing some kind of vest under his hoodie. Kovac’s bet was a stab vest.
Most people wouldn’t have seen any of this, and they certainly wouldn’t have connected the boy’s face to passing encounters almost a week earlier. But Kovac had spent the better part of twenty years studying faces. He had worked for the U.S. Government as a Navy SEAL, then for a conglomerate as a private-sector assassin. In both jobs, he had been the guy people called on to solve living, breathing problems, and it was a line of work that rewarded a good memory for faces.
Shut it off, he reminded himself.
At 35, Kovac was “retired”. His days killing for a living were behind him. He just needed someone to convince his brain of that. The hypervigilance was worse today, because today was one of the first times Kovac had ventured out into public without discreetly carrying some kind of weapon. He felt naked. Just as he had often touched or checked his pistol in its holster when he first started carrying twenty years ago, he now found his hand going to the front of his belt where it would normally have been. He had recently secured a gun here in London – a little Glock 42. And so far, despite the limited selection available on the British black market, he’d been happy enough with it.
Right now though, he didn’t even have that.
Nor even a knife.
Naked, he thought again.
He kept the kid in his peripheral vision as he resumed running, sticking to his route. The path took him up onto Putney Bridge, giving him a view upstream. There was already some light, enough for the lush greenery either side of the river to reflect on the water. Fast-moving under the bridge, Kovac noted, then seeming to come to a standstill the further out he looked. The lights were on at the boathouses and on the bridge, splashing orange barcodes out onto the water. Kovac took a deep breath. The sort he could only get at times like this. He felt at peace suddenly, and he was wondering where exactly the Oxford Cambridge boat race started when he saw the police.
They were in a car. Two of them, parked outside the boatsheds. Plain clothes, plain vehicle, but unmistakably a pair of cops.
A late night for them, too, he thought.
One had a take-out coffee and binoculars. He was alternating between the two. The other had his head down, like he was asleep.
The one with binoculars was staring straight across the river, towards the kid with three strikes.
Kovac resumed running, giving the police car a wide berth. He entered a deserted, a.m. street and kept to shadow. Dawn would bring traffic, and with each car, headlights like hunting dogs. But all that was in the future. Right now, London was sleeping, and he was able to move through pockets of complete darkness, one into the next. Anyone checking CCTV would’ve sworn they were watching a ghost get in some a.m. cardio.
Against his better judgment, Kovac came to a stop. He paused just before the boy and police car fell out of view. He looked back and saw he completed an invisible triangle from here, one which extended from him to the police, and back across the Themes to the boy.
Shut it off, he told himself again.
More like a reprimand this time.
He pretended to stretch, glancing at the boy’s silhouette, then at the police car, then at the boy again.
Kovac was sweating slightly. The air was balmy, almost steamy, suggesting a warm rain earlier in the night. Summer wasn’t far off now.
The street smelled like mud as his nose got closer to the blacktop, as if a week’s worth of dust had been picked up and flushed down the drains.
He loosened already loose hamstrings, still watching, still telling himself to mind his own business. He had an emergency contact with no links to Curzon International, curated over the years. His get-out-of-jail-free card, a digital escape plan if things went wrong with his employer, which they had. She helped him wire and access his money, helped him with fake IDs he could trust and provided him with access to databases he needed. But it was just the one contact. He didn’t have an infinite supply of anything – not anymore. If he got caught up in other people’s bullshit, Curzon would find him.
He pulled his eyes away from the boy, turned 180 degrees and looked on up the street. It was a mix of red brick and glass. Most windows were dark, save for a few that were lit up in office blocks. Presumably staff or cleaners had forgotten them on their way out the previous night. Traffic lights scrolled through red to green, then back to red, for no one’s benefit.
He needed to keep running, on up this street and into the park which lay beyond it. He had chosen London precisely because it was summer, because it was warm. He had always loved London, and this time of year it was a perfect place to run and study and generally decompress. He didn’t want any more snow, not after his las
t mission for Curzon in Japan. That mission had been in the depths of winter, and his employer had betrayed him, a misery that was compounded tenfold when Kovac screwed up and shot an innocent woman.
He was running from all that now. He had rented a house in Putney for a few months and had settled into a good routine. Up at 3:45 a.m., a run, breakfast, the gym, then five blocks of focused study. He had signed up for a course to improve his rusty Spanish, and he was teaching himself to code. It all normally kept the boredom at bay until lunch, by which time he had the Spanish class to look forward to. That class, for whatever reason, skewed heavily towards female enrolments.
The boy on the other side of the river started moving. Kovac watched him walk to the bridge. The cop with binoculars watched, too. The kid walked with his head bobbing round like it was on a spring, like he was expecting trouble.
Two cars stopped where the river path met the bridge at a right angle. They were parked more or less where Kovac had stood when looking upstream, before he spotted the police.
A pair of SUVs. Tinted windows, thudding music.
Kovac was no stranger to gangs. He had started out in one, before turning his life around, and he knew how this would go. The two cars that had pulled up would have older individuals in them. Men with similar backgrounds to the boy’s, but with wads of money in their pockets. They would offer the kid a pittance to put his entire future on the line, because twelve-year-olds were good for business. They were small enough to escape notice, yet could run drugs on a pushbike. A talented twelve-year-old could even throw acid in someone’s face or bury a knife in an abdomen.
But why here? Why in Putney?
Kovac saw it unfold, completely powerless to stop it. A window came down, a gun appeared, and two shots startled sleepy birds down at the water’s edge. The boy was on the ground by the time the sound reached Kovac. It ran across the surface of the river and echoed off the red brick and glass. The SUVs pulled out from the curb with a squealing of tires and started across the bridge. They accelerated hard and Kovac put their speed at eighty or ninety miles per hour by the time they tore past him. He felt a faint gust of air from each, buffeting him as he slipped even deeper into shadow.
He memorized both plates.
‘Hey, Gavin, wake the fuck up!’ The police officer was out of the car, shouting at his groggy partner. He threw his coffee aside and started running for the bridge. Kovac stared at him, logging another face.
And then Gavin, too.
Gavin was a big guy without being fat. He got out and winced and stretched and yawned and rolled his neck, like he’d seen this sort of thing a hundred times before. Gavin could care less. That much was clear. Or maybe he had been asleep when it happened and still didn’t understand what was going on here.
No, Kovac’s money was on the former. Gavin was the type who kept things in perspective, the type who slept well no matter what his day served up.
Just like Kovac back in the day.
Kovac put an earbud in one ear and chose a song on his phone. He needed to channel Gavin, not the idiot sprinting across the bridge to a corpse.
He resumed jogging.
Chapter 2
The Curzon hack began with a short video on a single screen in the lobby of the London office. The footage contained the sort of cliched imagery commonly seen at a benefit concert for the environment. There were elephants flapping big dusty ears. There were glaciers falling into the ocean. There were polar bears turning in confused circles and fish flapping in mud. Spliced between these images were brief flashes of grimy industrial cities. Chimneys spewed tons of smoke into the sky. Children sat in gutters and swatted at flies. And old men slept on cardboard.
There was no audio.
Ordinarily, the insignificant screen in question listed different departments in the seventeen-level, steel and glass building. Employees encountered it after swiping their passes. It was one of many expensive things at Curzon which became invisible after an employee’s second or third week. Even today it didn’t warrant more than a glance. Those who did notice the video assumed it was marketing. They figured that, given enough time, the grainy images would fall away to a sleek logo for some new Curzon product or initiative.
They were wrong.
As the day progressed, problems spread up through the seventeen levels. The malicious code began in the cafeteria, knocking out the self-service screen. Then secretaries lost the ability to schedule meetings, and HR databases vanished. Internal, internet-based telephones went dead or connected callers to sex and depression hotlines. Accounting found itself unable to issue invoices. And on the topmost floor of the building, Megan Curzon received two emails.
The first email came from a Curzon helpdesk worker at the New York office called Richard Ingles. The subject was “Possible data breach” and the email was marked urgent. There was no text in it, just an embedded image of three children standing near a jetty at the edge of a large dam. Megan recognized all three faces. In fact, she remembered the photograph being taken. It was a photo of her, her brother, Daniel, and the man she was nowadays trying to think of as John Kovac. She and her brother were perhaps ten, Kovac sixteen or so. It had been taken on a farm in Victoria, Australia, where her father had sent her to learn life skills from a former Navy SEAL called Bishop. It was Bishop who had taken the photo.
The second email was from the generic IT Services address and had been sent to every Curzon employee in Europe. It apologized for “an unforeseen IT issue” and assured staff that systems would be back by close of business at the latest.
Megan stiffened as she checked back on the first email and confirmed – with shoulder-dropping relief – that it had only been sent to her.
At least, as far as she could tell…
A man knocked on Megan’s glass office door, startling her. The glass was so thick and heavy, so bulletproof, it sounded like he was knocking on it underwater. He swiped his pass and pushed the door open, having to lean into the push to get momentum. ‘Ms. Curzon, they’re asking staff to unplug.’
He had the fresh cheeks and clean jawline of an intern.
Megan shut the image from her childhood as casually as she could. ‘Sorry?’
‘To unplug,’ he said, raising his voice.
‘No, I heard you – I meant unplug what? The network cable, or unplug from the wall?’
He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. It seemed he hadn’t anticipated this question. ‘I’ll need to get back to you on that – to confirm one-hundred percent – but absolutely. I presume yes, the network cable. And maybe the power too, just to be safe?’
‘Who told you this?’
‘They’re putting it on sheets of paper downstairs. With permanent marker.’
‘Who is?’
He tocked his head apologetically. ‘This is actually only my second week, so I haven’t learned all the names yet. The guy who sent me up here, he’s kind of tall with –’
‘That’s fine. Thank you.’
He tried to retreat and caught his shoulder on the glass doorframe. Megan had noticed this a lot since taking the helm of one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies. Everyone around her seemed stiff and clumsy and self-conscious, like they were all stuck on ice skates while she strode round in her black suede ankle boots. She wasn’t at all sure she liked leadership. Not at this level. But what else could she do? Her father deserved a retirement, and her brother had betrayed the family. That left her here, stuck in London.
She unplugged her network cable, then unplugged at the wall as well. She didn’t even bother to power down first. She sat for a moment, staring at her dark reflection on the dead computer screen. Seen like this, her red hair was almost black, her face gaunt, her skin dull. Her eyes zoomed in on one tiny patch of psoriasis on her left cheek – proof she had been taking into much coffee and sleeping like shit.
Proof her brother had left her under more stress that any sane human could take without –
A mess
age popped up telling her there was no input device.
She turned away and looked out over London. If this was a hack, it was already company-wide. Nothing happened in isolation in the twenty-first century. Everything in Curzon was connected, because that was the nature of global trade.
And they knew about Kovac. The photo from her past had made that clear.
She projected ahead.
Silence, chaos, entropy. That was the progression if this went from bad to worse – and it would. This was no ordinary IT issue. No ordinary hack even. Staff would figure that out, and they would begin to worry about identity theft. They would hotspot, go online, research, and spread rumors on social media. Curzon’s stock would wobble, then plummet. And it would keep on falling when the rumors were cross-checked and confirmed by journalists.
She picked up her phone. She heard a soft snapping, like one of the electric livestock fences back at Pemberton, the family cattle station in Australia that was the birthplace of Curzon. The exact sound they made when they earthed, she thought. Snap… snap… snap.
She hung up and took out her cell phone, but thought the better of it.
She switched it off as a precaution, until she knew more.
There was another knock on the door. This time it was a welcome face: Nixon Hsu, her assistant of many years, and perhaps the only person around her lately who wasn’t on skates. She had worked closely with Nix for years.
‘I was at lunch when I heard.’ He held up a cell phone in a pastel, shock-proof case. ‘I have my sister’s phone, completely unconnected to this place. Who do you want me to contact?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
He frowned and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He always did this when concerned Megan was succumbing to the pressures of her many roles. He had seen her at her worst – many times, in fact – and he never failed to deliver unwelcome truths when needed. It was part of what made him so valuable.
‘I’m not sure you understand the scale of this, Megan. Something this big will drag out. Staff aren’t going to be able to do their jobs. They’ll need to be reallocated. We’ll need to –’
